Digital Dignity
Artwork by NEJ for the electronic music artist Ritualz
To scroll through a digital feed in the middle of a live conversation is to interrupt a shared cognitive metabolism and replace it with empty caloric intake out of compulsion. Conversation is not the exchange of data. It is a co-regulated attentional process in which two nervous systems synchronize pace, tone, and interpretive effort. It is metabolically expensive. It requires working memory, emotional calibration, and sustained focus. When one participant silently lowers their gaze and begins to scroll, they are shifting from relational metabolism to passive consumption, which is rude and embarrassing.
The contemporary feed operates as informational white bread. It is refined and optimized for rapid ingestion. It delivers stimulation without density. Each fragment of content is small, pre-chewed, emotionally amplified, easily forgettable, and nothing demands sustained digestion. In nutritional terms, it resembles sugary processed food, which is engineered for pleasure, not nourishment. Nutritional science distinguishes between caloric intake and nutrient density. One can consume continuously and remain undernourished. The body feels temporarily satisfied, yet its deeper systems remain depleted. The same pattern now characterizes attention. A person can ingest an infinite stream of headlines, images, outrage, jokes, and micro-narratives and yet remain cognitively malnourished. When this ingestion occurs mid-conversation, it’s kind of pathetic. The person who continues speaking is engaged in slow cognition, constructing meaning in real time and offering unprocessed thought. The other participant abandons this dense exchange in favor of informational snack matter. Now, reciprocal dialogue has lower priority than algorithmic grazing.
Malnutrition is rarely dramatic at first. It accumulates. A diet of low-density inputs gradually weakens regulatory systems. Attention becomes scattered, tolerance for complexity shrinks, and the threshold for boredom lowers. The nervous system adapts to quick reward cycles and begins to resist sustained dialogue. In this state, conversation feels taxing because it unfolds at the pace of human thought rather than at the speed of engineered stimulation, offering no spikes to keep the dopamine system artificially engaged. Meanwhile, the feed is structured to displace depth, as its variable reward architecture mirrors the logic of slot machines. The user does not select nourishment, instead, they pull a lever and the next stimulus appears. The body remains seated at the table, but cognitively the person has relocated to a probabilistic chamber of intermittent reinforcement. In that moment, they are absent from the shared field.
Absence without acknowledgment destabilizes the other participant. Conversation depends on mutual tracking. When eye contact breaks and does not return or when responses become lazily delayed, the remaining speaker must compensate. They monitor the other person’s engagement and decide whether to continue, leading them to simplify their thought and the metabolic load shifts asymmetrically. The deeper insult lies in what is chosen as substitute fuel. To disengage from a living intelligence in front of you in order to consume algorithmically sequenced snacks is to privilege processed stimulus over embodied presence. It is the cognitive equivalent of leaving a shared meal to eat packaged sugar in the hallway. This is why ritual matters. Historically, we marked exits from shared space. We said “excuse me” and acknowledged the interruption. These gestures preserved the integrity of the exchange. In the digital era, we have removed the boundary between shared attention and private consumption.
To normalize asking permission to “enter the vortex” is not prudish. The phrase exposes the reality of what is occurring. It names the feed as a separate environment, one that competes with the present moment. A culture that normalizes constant grazing will eventually struggle to tolerate density. Conversation requires density. It requires the willingness to remain with unfolding thought without immediate reward. If we continue to replace relational nourishment with informational filler, we should not be surprised when attention weakens. Presence is nutritive. When we abandon it without acknowledgment, we signal that processed stimulus outranks embodied exchange.
At minimum, we can mark the departure. If one must leave the table to ingest digital scraps, one can at least say so.
